A Grammar of Araona

This book is a comprehensive grammatical description of Araona, a Tacanan language spoken by about 140 people in the Amazonian rain forest of northwestern Bolivia. Araona belongs to the Tacanan language family, a small family that today comprises of no more than five languages. This book is primarily based on first hand data collected in the Araona-speaking communities, during three field trips of a total of 16 months. Cast in the typological-functional framework, and predominantly based on natural discourse data, the grammar presents a detailed account of many aspects of the language. The grammar will be of interest to typologists as it has features shared by languages around the globe including relational nouns, singular-dual-plural number distinctions, suffixes expressing associated motion and posture. The grammar will be useful for historical linguists, especially those interested in the genetic relationships of the Tacanan languages among themselves as well ass with other language families

Topological relations and frames of reference in Mayan languages: Kaqchikel, K'iche', Tz'utujil and Q'anjobal

This paper deals with the perception and linguistic expression of topological relationships between spatial objects, and frames of reference that speakers of some Mayan languages of highland Guatemala, Kaqchikel, Tz’utujil, and Q’anjob’al employ. Kaqchikel and Tz’utujil both belong to the K’iche’an branch, Q’anjob’al is a member of the Q’anjob’alan branch. Spatial reference in Mayan and other Mesoamerican languages is characterized by the widespread absence or paucity of use of relative frames and and the highly productive use of ‘meronymic’ terminologies for object parts and spatial regions based primarily on object geometry. Terms for parts of the human body are perhaps universally the prototypical meronyms. In many Mayan languages meronymies represent perhaps the most important resource for the expression of place functions (Jackendoff 1983). It has been hypothesized that the pervasive use of geometric meronyms in the expression of spatial relations is a linguistic factor that biases the speakers of a language against the use of relative frames. This paper will fill a gap and contribute to the discussion by adding three more.The paper will present data on topological relation markers in Kaqchikel, Tz’utujil, and Q’anjobal. The data is based on data collected during fieldwork

From ergative case-marking to hierarchical agreement

International audienceThis paper reconstructs the history of a set of innovated 1st and 2nd person verbal prefixes in Reyesano which manifest the phenomenon of 'hierarchical agreement' in transitive clauses, according to a 2>1>3 hierarchy. I argue that these prefixes come from independent ergative-absolutive pronouns which first became case-neutral enclitics in 2nd position in main clauses and then verb prefixes. And I show that the hierarchical effects that the prefixes manifest in synchrony have nothing to do with the working of a hierarchy during the grammaticalization process. In doing so, the paper contributes to the growing body of diachronic evidence against the idea that the person hierarchy is a universal of human language reflecting a more general principal of human cognition

Typology of Pluractional Constructions in the Languages of the World

The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach